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C H A P T E R 6 MAKING THE DIFFERENCE: RETHINKING RELIGIOUS PLURALISM IN LOCAL AND UNIVERSAL HORIZONS All things are full of gods.1 The appeal to transcendence as a source of meaningful vitality—that is, God, Krishna, Nirvana, the Tao, Wakan Tanka, and so forth—is an inherently finite and social act. As we explored in chapter 5, elemental trust is never fully guaranteed and exists amidst the fundamental ambiguity of not-having. Thus, it must be self-consciously recovered against the pull of anxiety. It is in the work of such recovery that limit-expressions emerge and take thematic shape in theodicies of one sort or another. But limit-expressions are not derivatives of some inviolable core experience that is everywhere the same. There is no predetermined or deductive passage from fundamental trust to thematic expression. Yet neither are limit-expression wafted into existence ex nihilo. They are imaginative interpretations and as such are wedded to the localized world-building enterprise of specific communities of discourse. It should be no surprise then that theodicies bear the stamp of particular fields of semantic power, providing orientation to a trustworthy cosmos in light of the exigencies and concerns that draw into focus a particular community’s stability and well-being. Recall that Presence is never given immediately in some “pure” revelation. Its trace is inscribed in trust as an absolute affectedness, which invokes the anticipatory affirmation of a universal and unconditional horizon of trustworthiness. But this affirmation is only actualized as an appeal to transcendence from within a particular framework and its historical heft. The local and the universal exist in tension, side by side in a mutually fructifying relation. The discussion in this chapter seeks to harness the generative power in this tension as a potentially global form of being faithful to one’s own tradition while remaining opened up to the genuine value of others. There is a kind of 165 double vision at work here. David Tracy captures the idea eloquently: “[S]tay faithful to your own tradition; go deeper and deeper into its particularities; defend and clarify its identity. At the same time, wander, Ulysses-like, willingly, even eagerly, among other great traditions and ways; try to learn something of their beauty and truth; concentrate on their otherness and difference as the new route to communality.”2 In a similar spirit, I advocate an ongoing and dialogical search for what is similar in our differences and different in our similarities. Indeed, the universal is realized only in the particular and local; yet the local itself is universalizing, opened out to an inclusive matrix of a sharing solidarity. Such solidarity, however, is no easy alliance. While it is inevitable that convergent truths will emerge from dialogue, it is also the case that differences will become accented, disorienting and sharpening each other, calling each other into accountability by exposing false closures or idolatries.3 What remains is a discordant concordance, a dialectical pluralism. Broadly conceived, this chapter is composed of three sections. The basic argument of section one is that there is no solitary actualization of trust, for we find ourselves already along the way with others, inescapably located in the public space of a given cultural-historical horizon that shapes the way in which we configure human life and its capacity for meaningful vitality. Trust emerges concretely as already overdetermined. And this means that, in its religious formation , trust necessarily displays diverse configurations, pluralized through and through. But I do not wish to conclude with the mere fact of plurality. For, in the second section, I suggest that trust can become distorted and indeed idolatrous . Based upon this, the discussion takes a turn toward outlining the contours of a nonidolatrous religious faith, in its condition of plurality, as an imaginative and double-visioned opening toward translocal difference. How so? Through an availability facilitated by what I call the “iconic” power of the appeal to transcendence , a power that “makes a difference” in being “difference making.” In the final section, then, I contend against polemical, monistic, and historicist understandings of religious pluralism that a dialectical pluralism of solidarity best suits the very character of the religious sensibility. LOCAL HORIZONS: RELIGIOUS FAITH AS A COMMUNAL EVENT We acquire the tools for concretely realizing trust by inheriting a designate language from which we “discover” our place in a given world. But discovery in this sense is too strong a word. Explicit trust comes to the fore more in...

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